Art in the Parks

Through collaborations with a diverse group of arts organizations and artists, Parks brings to the public both experimental and traditional art in many park locations. Please browse our list of current exhibits below, explore our archives of past exhibits or read more about the Art in the Parks Program.

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Find out which current exhibits are on display near you, and browse our permanent monument collection.

Search Current and Past Exhibits

2008

Manhattan

George Rickey, Two Open RectanglesOctober 1, 2007 to April 23, 2008Union Square Park, Manhattan

Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.

Description:

Two Open Rectangles, a stainless steel kinetic sculpture,
is made to move gently in response to any gust of wind. In this way,
the sculpture, like other kinetic work in the artist’s oeuvre,
translates the transitory nature of the wind’s movement into the more
physical form of steel.

George Rickey (1907-2002) began his career as a painter in the
cubist style. He later changed mediums and began his career in
sculpture, starting with mobiles. Rickey’s mobile work eventually
became the large, steel, kinetic forms for which he is most
well-known. His work was included in the 1967 exhibition Sculpture in Environment.

Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.

Description:

Perceval is a life-sized horse and cart, a replica of the
sort of china ornament that have had pride of place on many British
mantelpieces. Scaled up, the horse is majestic in his power but offers
an unthreatening sense of stolid comfort in his benign reliability. In
the proudly fashioned cart are two concrete cast squashes, outsize and
off-scale, fertility symbols implicating a competitive rural contest to
rival the ritual of the maypole. These giant vegetables are cast in
cement, one of Lucas’s favored materials, and take the replication of
the horse and cart knick-knack away from kitsch, the crudeness of this
signature Lucas gesture thrown into sharper relief by the high finish
of the bronze sculpture.

Perceval reflects a fascination for Englishness evident in
much of Lucas’s work. The title is borrowed from the name of one of
King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. Raised in a forest
by his mother, the virtuous and noble Perceval meets the knights as
they pass and goes off the join them, later becoming involved in the
quest for the Holy Grail. The story has been reworked in various
contemporary versions, notably Eliot’s The Wasteland and Wagner’s opera Parsifal, in which version the eponymous hero is the one to recover the spear used to pierce Christ during his crucifixion.

Sarah Lucas is one of the most significant contemporary women artists
working in London today. She is among the group of artists who are
credited with being a catalyst for the Young British Artist (YBA)
movement, which has brought to light the likes of artists including
Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Tracey Emin, and others. Her work has been
exhibited in numerous museums, including Tate Modern in London,
Kunsthalle Zurich, Kunstverein Hamburg, and others.

Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.

Description:Boaz Vaadia’s group of bronze and bluestone boulder sculptures placed
throughout Morningside Park and two locations on the Broadway Malls
create collectively, as the artist says, a “contemplative connection
between various communities.” The works are site-specific in that the
materials Vaadia uses, slate, shingle, bluestone (here cast in bronze),
are all materials that are found in the native geology of the New York
City area. Vaadia’s working method of hand-carving and then stacking
layers of stone to create his forms recalls ancient methods of
stone-carving and construction. For select works, Vaadia then
continues the process by casting the original stone sculpture in bronze.

Angel Orensanz, The Garden Before the SnakeSeptember 1, 2007 to March 31, 2008Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, Manhattan

Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.

Description:

The steel-pipe sculpture group by the artist Angel Orensanz, The Garden Before the Snake, is an expression of the artist’s concept of a "garden." Orensanz has described The Garden
"as a utopian horizon for humankind’s endless growth and harmony" with
the foil of "the serpent" or the "snake" acting as a representation of
the "fragility" and "fragile future" of humankind.

Spanish-born Orensanz is likely best known for his purchase and
refurbishment of a circa 1849 unused synagogue on Norfolk Street in New
York City’s Lower East Side. Orensanz first used this as his studio,
and then in 1992, along with his brother and several other artists,
established the Angel Orensanz Foundation. The Foundation now occupies
the building.

Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.

Description:

Kuhn’s sculpture for the Cloisters Lawn is a monumental wooden
cut-out in the silhouette of a grand, equestrian memorial statue. The
artist recasts this classic image of the hero into an examination of
what has been left out or forgotten in our histories. It forcibly
reinterprets the idea of the vanquisher. Kuhn chose Fort Tryon Park for
Monument in part because its physical geography—high on a
hilltop—enhances the association of the conquering figure. In addition,
the proximity of the Cloisters lends further connection to the history
of Western regimes (including the advent of the American industrialists
who took as their “spoils” the art and architecture of past European
empires). Finally, the artist adds that the diverse communities of the
surrounding neighborhoods speak to the many cultures whose histories
are often overlooked in the narrative of the subjugating Western men
that still dominates our textbooks.

Kuhn was born in 1971 in Boston and now lives in Brooklyn and works in
Long Island City. She has a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and
has trained in Italy at La Cipressaia, Montagnana, and Scuola Lorenzo
di Medici in Florence. She has had solo exhibitions of her work in New
York, San Francisco, and Boston, with a show in Seoul, Korea scheduled
for October 2007.

This project was organized by ZieherSmith Gallery and made possible by the Fort Tryon Park Trust.

Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.

Description:

Kenny Scharf’s bronze sculpture Totemikon riffs on the
traditional form of a totem pole. As the title suggests, the sculpture
explores themes of “totems” and “icons” as seen through Scharf’s
aesthetic, which is very much informed by pop and contemporary-culture
influences.

Scharf rose to prominence in the 1980s New York art world. The
artist was part of a group of dynamic artists, including Jean-Michel
Basquiat and Keith Haring. Scharf’s work often employs a cartoon or
cartoon-like aesthetic, using that seemingly childlike style to comment
on adult themes.

Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.

Description:

Like many of his works, Van de Bovenkamp’s Cloud Kicker was
inspired by organic forms—in this case, the sky. The sculpture was made
from stainless steel, a material the artist likes for its strength and
contemporary appearance, as well as its reflective quality that
modifies the work’s appearance as the light changes throughout the day.

Born in 1938 in Garderen, Holland, Van de Bovenkamp trained first as an
architect and then studied sculpture at the University of Michigan.
Upon graduating from college in 1961, Van de Bovenkamp moved to New
York City in order to pursue his dream of becoming a sculptor. Select
one-person shows and group exhibitions include the Arlene Bujese
Gallery, East Hampton, NY; New Leaf Gallery, Berkeley, CA; Kouros
Sculpture Garden, Ridgefield, CT; Louis K. Meisel Gallery in New York,
NY; and Sagaponack Sculpture Fields, Sagaponack, NY. Additionally, Van
de Bovenkamp’s works are featured in numerous corporate, museum,
university, and public collections.

This project was organized by the Louis K. Meisel Gallery.

City Lore, Your Guide to the Lower East SideSeptember 10, 2007 to February 28, 2008Straus SquareSeward Park, Manhattan

Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.

Description:Your Guide, a joint project between Place Matters, the Lower
East Side Tenement Museum, and the Lower East Community Preservation
projects, seeks to illuminate small moments in the larger history of
the neighborhood. The Your Guide project uses graphically
interesting signs to tell first-person stories generated from
interviews with current and past neighborhood residents. These signs
promote insider perspectives, allowing residents and visitors alike to
feel a sense of intimacy and welcome; the project enables viewers to
feel as if they are sharing in a story rather than getting a history
lesson.

Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.

Description:

Roxy Paine’s three works: Conjoined, a 40 foot-tall sculpture of two
intertwined trees; Defunct, a 42 foot-tall sculpture of a lone tree
that appears to be under attack from the shelf-fungus growing on it’s
trunk; and Erratic, a boulder measuring 7 feet high by 15 feet wide, are
part of a larger series of works by the artist. These works come out of
the artist’s interest in the interactions between humans and nature and
specifically from Paine’s examination of nature through the lens of
industrial processes.

Presented by Mad. Sq. Art, a program of the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

Kent Henricksen, Playing with FeathersOctober 1, 2007 to January 5, 2008Manhattan

Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.

Description:Kent Henricksen’s Playing with Feathers, a
playful-yet-disturbing, smaller than life-size bronze sculpture, has
taken up temporary residence in Seward Park. The bronze, of a small
figure covered in feathers, speaks to the integration of fantasy and
reality, evoking both the playfulness of imagination and the disquiet
of the strange and unknown.

Henricksen’s work is currently on view through October 6, 2007 at John
Connelly Presents in "Divine Deviltries," the artist’s second solo show
at the gallery.